Tentacles Lab

Our music laboratory where we experiment with our gear, and we enjoy cooking new ideas.

This is Tentacles Lab

Not everything that is born in the Lab will be in a Tentacles album. We discard material that is not suitable with the Tentacles musical concept. What you see here is just a sketch, and we don’t know if a new theme will grow from it. Time will tell…

We have decided to share all this material with you. You can see this and other videos in our Youtube channel. Please subscribe!! You can download the audio from our Soundcloud.

LAB 0001
Elektron Analog Keys + Fender Jazz

LAB 0002
EHX DRM 16 + MicroSynth + Bif Muff

LAB 0003
Octatrack + Analog Keys + PO12

LAB 0004
Eurorack + Octatrack + Analog Keys

LAB 0005
Eurorack + Analog Keys

LAB 0006
Web Audio Keyboard

LAB 0007
Eurorack + Octatrack + AK + The Crew

LAB 0008
Ambient HHHiiiggghhh LLLiiifffeee

LAB 0009
Generative Ambient

Technology is a creative booster, and it has always gone hand by hand with art (from Leonardo Da Vinci to John Cage).

A laboratory of music? what?

From the beginning, in the late 40’s, the laboratories has been an important part of the evolution of electronic music.

In 1948 Pierre Schaeffer composed the first electroacoustic piece: Cinq études de bruits, with the use of pre-recorded sounds in tape (early sampling) in the RTF Paris studios. Pierre Henry later joined to compose some of the first Musique Concrete pieces.

At the same time, Louis and Bebe Barron where experimenting in their New York lab with a tape recorder founding the first electronic music studio recording in America, and building their own equipment: oscillators, filters, reverbs. These will be used by the american avant-garde composers (John Cage, Morton Fieldman,…)

In 1951, Werner Meyer and Herbert Eimert created the WDR Cologne’s Studio for Electronic Music, that would become the most famous electronic music studio in the world, where Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Ligeti or Boulez,…recorded. This studio was pioneer in synthesize music entirely from electronically produced signals.

Later, there has been a lot of famous studios (labs) where the musicians experimented with their equipment to produce new sounds, pushing forward the music with the use of the latest technology.

We can cite a few of the most famous here:

〈 G.A.S. Our Equipment 〉

Music technology has been improving over the years, and musicians have been always feeling the necessity to be up to date with the most modern inventions, trying to push forward ,searching for new sounds and new ways to perform or record their music.

But take care!! G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) can be hard to control. And we, electronic musicians, know a lot about it. Visiting daily music blogs like Create Digital Music, Hispasonic or Synthtopia, reading countless pages from forums like Gearslutz or Muff Wiggler (if you have bite the modular bug, like we have done recently) doesn’t help to keep GAS under control. It’s really hard if you love music technology.

We have just entered the modular world with 2 new acquisitions, the first being a new Doepfer Eurorack Case (6U) with only 5 basic doepfer modules that soon will grow with new modules from Mutable Instruments (we hope) and maybe a few diy modules (we built a Shruthi in the past).

The second is Axoloti, a software/hardware platform we helped supporting an Indiegogo campaign. A very interesting project we hope will grow over the years.

The most important part of our set is however the Elektron Octatrack. We bought it in 2011 and it is, without any doubt, the center of our set. It’s a sampler/sequencer with lots of possibilities and a few drawbacks. We love it!. You can do a whole album with it alone. It’s very deep and sometimes a little hard to understand, but it definitely has a very strong